Not that Judd would have answered, but the wave gave him a chance to jump into the conversation. “We don’t have a shot,” he said. Part of him wished he’d put some kid gloves on it, but Audrey would have likely taken that as an opening—yet something else she’d been doing for a while now.
“Well.” There was the dry amusement again. “I see.” She set the box of cookies on the dispatch counter. “I said this to...well, that doesn’t matter, but I’ll say it to you now. I wish you only the best.”
“Thanks for that. I feel the same way about you.” He was sincere but it probably felt like a jab, something along the lines of “we’ll always be friends.”
Audrey folded her arms over her chest and glanced away from him. “This won’t interfere with Cleo and the Gray Mare,” she said.
If Audrey had been looking at him, Judd was certain that she would have seen his blank, confused stare. “Excuse me?”
“The Gray Mare.” She waved that off, too, but then kept talking. “If Cleo is interested in buying it, my feelings for you won’t get in the way.”
That statement didn’t do away with his blank stare, but he decided this was a conversation he’d best have with Cleo and not a woman who was currently blinking back tears.
Well, crap. He’d hurt Audrey. Not intentionally. But, yeah, he’d hurt her.
Swiping at one of those tears, Audrey walked out, leaving Judd to curse himself and wish for a rock that he could use to hit himself on the head. This was why he put up walls and shut people out, but apparently his wall-building skills were seriously lacking.
“Is the coast clear?” Liberty asked, coming back from her bathroom break. “Yum, cookies,” she added when she peered into the box.
“Help yourself,” Judd offered. “I’m heading home.”
Liberty wasted no time biting into one of the failed nookie bribes. “Wait. Did you get the letter that came for you?” Liberty asked.
Judd had already reached for the door, but that stopped him. “What letter?”
Clamping the cookie in between her teeth, Liberty riffled through the inbox on Ginger’s desk and came up with a letter in a plain white envelope. Judd took it, his attention immediately going to the return address.
Shit.
* * *
CLEO TURNED OFF her headlights as she approached the ranch. Since it was nearly 2:00 a.m. on a school night, she didn’t want to wake the boys or anyone else in the house. She parked outside Judd’s cabin, frowning when there were no lights on inside. Not that she’d expected him to be up, but it didn’t feel right just creeping in like this. That was yet another reminder that she needed to make better arrangements.
Being in Judd’s bed had some incredible benefits—sex and the amazing view of having him naked next to her—but she needed her own place. Judd was already doing so much to help with the boys, and she didn’t want him to start feeling as if this had all been crammed down his throat. First thing in the morning, she would need to press the Realtor again to come up with a rental for her.
She dragged herself from her car and felt her feet and calves groan in protest. Normally, wearing heels didn’t bother her, but she’d ended up having to tend the bar after Tiny had come down with stomach flu.
Cleo pulled off the shoes when she reached the porch and eased open the cabin door. She hadn’t been wrong about no lights being on inside. It was pitch-dark, so she waited a moment for her eyes to adjust.
That’s when she saw, and heard, Judd.
“Dick inches,” he mumbled.
Wearing only a pair of boxers, Judd was sitting on the sofa, and he had the stuffed rattlesnake, Sweetcakes, positioned on the coffee table directly in front of him. Cleo figured that would have caused anyone to be alarmed, but she knew what the snake meant. It was his distraction, a focal point, and coupled with his safe words, Judd was trying to stave off his need for a drink.
She froze, not sure what she should do. Judd didn’t give her any clues about that. He just kept saying “Dick inches.”
“Bad night?” she asked. Turning on a lamp, she went closer and sank down on the table across from him. That put her right next to the snake. Judd probably didn’t know that doing it had taken some effort on her part. The snake creeped her out, but that seemed very small potatoes compared to what Judd was going through.
“I’m okay,” he insisted.
Maybe. There weren’t any signs of liquor around, and he clearly wasn’t dressed to go out and buy some.
“We can work this three ways,” she said. “I can call Mercy or—”
“No.” Judd shook his head, plowed his hands through his hair.
“We can work this two ways,” Cleo amended. “You can tell me to get lost or—”
“No,” he interrupted.
“Okay, that makes it really easy.” Well, it did if he went with option three, which she was still sort of formulating in her mind. “You tell me what’s wrong, and we talk this out.”
Silence. But at least it wasn’t a “no.”
“And then we can have sex,” she added to sweeten the pot. “Dirty sex,” she amended.
It had the intended effect. Judd not only looked at her, but he also gave a little flat chuckle that was totally half-hearted, but it was better than dick inches and rattlesnake staring.
She hoped.
Judd still didn’t say anything, but he took something from off the sofa and tossed it onto her lap. It was a letter, and while the envelope had obviously been opened, she didn’t take it out and read it. However, she did look at the return address, and bells the size of Texas started to clang in her head when she saw the name. A name she recognized.
“Avis Odell,” Cleo commented. “The man who hurt Nico and Callen.” And she began to come up with all sorts of stinky scenarios. Maybe Avis was threatening Judd or poking at old memories. Maybe the guy was just being a bastard.
With his hands still in his hair, Judd groaned and leaned back on the sofa. “Avis is in some twelve-step program, and he wants to apologize. To make amends. He says now that he’s clean and sober he knows what he did was unforgivable but that he hopes I can find it in my heart to get past what he did.”
Cleo took a moment to let that sink in. “The asshole.”
Judd looked at her. “That was my reaction, too.”
She nodded. “Anything he could say would take a poke at you and stir up old memories. But now he wants you to clear his conscience. Even if he’s being sincere, it’s still an asshole thing to do.”
Of course, if Avis did nothing at all, she’d still put him in that category. Basically, he was going to carry that label no matter what.
Judd nodded. “I think it’s supposed to feel petty if I don’t forgive him.”
“Do you want to forgive him?” Cleo asked.
“No.” He groaned. “Maybe. I would if I thought it’d make this all go away.” He tapped his head.
Cleo leaned in so their gazes would connect, and she, too, gave him a head tap. “I don’t think that’s going away. It’s made you who you are, and it isn’t the sex talking when I tell you that you’re a good man.”
He stared at her. “A man who won’t forgive a sonofabitch.”
“A man who doesn’t have to forgive a sonofabitch,” she amended. “Just because Avis wants this from you, it doesn’t mean you have to give it to him. One letter doesn’t clean up the stench of a bad asshole.”
She frowned at that and bit back the “ewww” that formed in her throat. Judd smiled, causing that “ewww” to ease up some. Apparently, icky humor was the way to go here to lighten his dark mood.
“What does a receptionist at a sperm bank say as clients leave?” Judd asked her, but he didn’t wait even a second before he continued. “Thanks for coming.”
Now she smiled. “A Mercy joke?”
He nodded, reached out and
pushed a strand of hair from her cheek. He didn’t pull back, though. He let the curl wrap around his finger. It was a simple gesture, but it sent a really loud signal to her. Then again, Judd just being Judd sent signals that caused the heat to stir inside her. She considered telling the heat to knock it off, that Judd might need to keep talking this through.
But Cleo thought of something else that might work.
Of course, she was pretty sure the heat had been the one to come up with the idea. Still, as ideas went, it wasn’t an awful one.
“For the next fifteen minutes or so,” she said, “let me be your distraction and your safe words.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Dick inches and a stuffed snake?”
“Not quite.”
She scooted to the edge of the coffee table, dragged Judd to her and she kissed him. Because this was a test to see if this idea sucked or not, she carefully noted his reaction. And it was a good one. He made a husky sound of pleasure, maybe mixed with some surprise, but he slid right into the kiss.
“For the next fifteen minutes or so, I want to make you forget,” she whispered against his mouth.
“Fifteen minutes?” Judd hooked his arm around her and hauled her into his lap. “Let’s go for thirty.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
JUDD STOOD IN the shower, his hands braced against the tiles and his head down while the scalding hot water hit the back of his neck. Despite the late-night sex with Cleo that had lasted well past the thirty minutes, he still felt the tension in nearly every muscle of his body.
Nearly.
His dick still seemed content that it’d gotten lucky, but he rarely put much stock in that brainless part of himself. It didn’t take into account things like emotional baggage, reality or limitations of a hard-on. Thirty minutes was a long time to last with Cleo and her clever arsenal of sex tricks. The woman certainly knew how to take him all in.
Since the reminder of that snagged the interest of his dick again, Judd pushed aside the thought and went back to the emotional baggage/reality that the brainless wonder had dismissed. He needed to deal with the tension, with those tight neck muscles and with the dick punch he’d felt when he’d gotten that letter from Avis.
He didn’t want to give Avis any kind of power over him like this. Even if the man had changed his ways, he would always be a piece of shit in Judd’s mind. Maybe it wasn’t mature to hang on to that, but Judd just didn’t see a way of letting it go. Not yet, anyway. Maybe not ever, and he’d have to live with that. No way could he let asshole Avis twist him up again and cause him to risk his sobriety.
Behind him, the shower door opened, and he felt the warm slide of the front of Cleo’s body against the back of his. Her nipples rubbed against him in the best kind of massage. Now that was better than hot water for relaxing all muscles but his dick.
“This is nice,” he said, reaching around to grab her ass cheek, “but we’ll have to be quiet so we don’t wake Cleo.”
She bit him on his shoulder. “Don’t worry. Cleo’s a heavy sleeper. She’ll never have to know. But you’ll know,” she assured him. Her tone was both playful and slick with heat.
And speaking of slick, that applied to her wet hands, too, because she skimmed them over his butt, around his hips and to the front of him.
“I’ve never had you in the shower,” she said. She had a condom and immediately started rolling it on him. “Are you better here than in the bed or on the couch?”
“Here.”
It was all bravado, of course. The shower was small and slippery, which would not only limit movement, but it would also possibly result in injury, scalding or death. His dick dismissed those concerns and declared this the greatest idea ever by getting harder than stone.
“I do my best work on the floor, though,” he assured her, turning so he could capture her mouth with his. It was a good capture, all right. She tasted like mint toothpaste and sin, and that combo was apparently some potent foreplay.
“You’ll have to prove that to me later.” She licked his neck, flicking her tongue over his earlobe. “And I’ll prove I do my best work on the seat of your truck.”
Judd hadn’t thought he could get even harder, but that comment proved him wrong. Which was crazy since truck sex would give him even less maneuvering room than this shower, and the last time he’d tried it, when he’d been eighteen or so, he’d bruised his kidney on the gear stick. Still, he rather liked the idea of nailing Cleo in as many locations as possible.
She continued with the licks and tongue flicks as Judd hoisted her up so she could wrap her legs around his waist. The injuries started almost immediately. Her elbow banged against the door. The faucet that had seemingly gotten razor-sharp dug into his hip bone. Pain, though, wasn’t much of a deterrent because the moment the centers of their bodies were all lined up, Judd pushed inside her.
And everything but Cleo vanished.
Tight, wet and, well, perfect. Of course, that was his dick talking again, but his brain thought that maybe this one time the dick had it right. It was perfect. Well, if you totally discounted the pain.
Cleo yelped when her knee accidentally nudged the faucet so that the water spray turned to icicles. Without breaking the rhythm of the thrusts, Judd fixed the temp and shifted them so that Cleo’s back went against the shower door. That would have been a clever idea if the door had been fully closed.
It wasn’t.
They tumbled backward, and it was only through luck and his leg muscles that they didn’t fall on their asses.
With Cleo laughing like a loon and with her legs still hooked around him, he lowered them to the floor. Half of their bodies were still in the shower and the water was spewing out all over the room. Those weren’t concerns, though, for a dick on his mission. And his definitely had a mission, one as timeless as sex itself.
To get Cleo off so he could then do the same.
Cleo’s laughter died down when Judd got serious about the getting off. That was the thing about going deeper, faster and harder—everything pinpointed to finishing this and finding that “pot of gold” release at the end of the thrusting rainbow.
Cleo and he had only been together a handful of times, but he could tell when he had her close to a climax. It went against everything his hard-on was demanding, but Judd slowed a little, to draw it out a few more seconds. And he used those seconds to clear his vision and watch her face.
Amazing. So beautiful.
At least that’s what his mind was thinking. His hard-on had moved back to its original train of thought. “Nail her now” started to repeat with each new thrust. Unfortunately, he was a guy, through and through, and therefore powerless to resist it. Judd nailed her, feeling her body squeeze around him like a greedy fist. He was powerless against greedy fists, too, because he finished like a double-engine rocket right behind her.
There was also a problem with finishing like that. It drained him of any energy he could have used to get them off the now sopping wet bathroom floor. In the back of his mind, he figured it had to be worse for Cleo, since she was lying in at least an inch of water that was quickly turning cold. Still, she managed a very smug and not the least bit uncomfortable smile when she looked up at him.
“You’re right.” Her voice was a slack purr now, and her eyes were glazed with the aftershocks of the climax. “You do do your best work on the floor.”
He smiled with her. Kissed her. And probably would have just collapsed on her if she hadn’t taken his face in her hands.
Cleo looked him straight in the eyes. “Judd, I’m in love with you.”
* * *
CLEO WATCHED JUDD FREEZE. Maybe time did, as well. In fact, the only thing that didn’t seem to be in freeze mode was Cleo herself.
She laughed, but it wasn’t the ha-ha “got you with a joke, didn’t I?” kind of laughter. Though Judd probably would have preferred t
hat. In fact, he likely wanted her to jump back in a time machine and have a do-over, where those words didn’t even pop into her head much less come out of her mouth. But she had said them. And she meant them.
She was in love with him.
It was a strong, strange mix of feelings. Like an incredible emotional orgasm that had built, then soared, then skyrocketed and finally slammed through her with pleasure and relief.
Yes, relief.
Until the moment she’d said the words, she hadn’t known what she was going to do with all the stuff that she felt for him. She hadn’t really had a handle on just how deep all the feelings could go. But the handle was there now, and it would change her life forever.
Cleo was pretty sure it would change Judd, too, but maybe not in the heart-bursting way it had her. He’d be scared, she knew, and she could practically hear all those doubts galloping through his head right now. He would consider himself a planet-sized emotional risk. Someone incapable of anything more than recreational sex, but Cleo hoped to change his mind about that. And if she didn’t...
Well, Judd Laramie was certainly worth a broken heart.
It would sound mushy if she said it aloud—and could possibly send Judd into cardiac arrest if he wasn’t already—but even if her love for him stayed one-sided, that was enough.
Judd didn’t say anything. He just lay there, staring at her, but she saw in his eyes the moment that changed. He was about to attempt to talk her out of what she’d said. Maybe even rationalize it away as the side effect of the orgasm. That was her cue to get out of there and give him some time.
Unlike Judd, she could move. Perhaps because the water beneath her acted like a lubricant. She shimmied and wiggled until she was out from under him, and she stood, the water sliding down her body and plopping in fat drops onto him.
She leaned down long enough to smack a kiss on his stunned mouth before she grabbed a towel and walked out. Of course, that meant giving him a view of her bare ass—which he would have almost certainly noticed if his brain had been able to register more than just surprise.
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